Ten Philosophical Mistakes? By John Smithin

Ten Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought – How They Came About, Their Consequences, and How to Avoid Them is the title of a book published 35 years ago by Mortimer J. Adler. Adler (1902–2001) was a well-known philosopher, educator, and popular author. He was an editor of the series Great Books of the Western World by Encyclopedia Britannica, and one of founders of the Institute for Philosophical Research. In philosophy he worked very much in the tradition of Aristotle, and of Aristotle’s great medieval follower and interpreter, St. Thomas Aquinas. As these activities indicate, he (Adler) was not at all in sympathy with the mainstream cultural and philosophical trends of his day. He thought that the mistakes, as he saw them, had had serious negative consequences for, as he put it ‘our understanding of our lives, our institutions, and our experience’. That seems to have a particular resonance at the present time. In other posts on the API Blog Leora Barak, for example, has recently written of the current year, 2020, as a ‘time for reflection’, and Judith Goldman has a shared a poem describing some our contemporary challenges. But, beyond the pressures and problems of current events there is also a widespread feeling, I think it is fair to say, of a deeper malaise that seems to be overwhelming our civilization. Perhaps philosophy has had something to do with it? Adler for his part was optimistic. At the time of writing of his book he felt that ‘it is not too late to reverse the tide of centuries upon centuries of escalating misconceptions and learn to live richer and happier lives’. But is that still true today?

I have put a question mark after the word ‘mistakes’ in the title of this post because not everyone will agree that they are mistakes. Nonetheless, whether we accept Alder’s arguments or not, I still think that it will be a very useful exercise for our Aurora Philosophy Club to discuss each one of them, in turn, and hopefully in some depth. Going through the list they do seem to cover most of topics and debates that recur again and again in philosophy. They certainly touch many of the bases that we seem to come back to, time after time, in our APC discussions.

The term ‘modern’, as in Alder’s notion of ‘modern thought’, has a rather specialized meaning in philosophy. It does not just mean recent, or up-to-date. Much of recent thought is not ‘modern’ in the philosophical sense at all, it might more correctly be described as ‘post-modern’. To give some more idea of the way the term is used, consider the title of a course of lectures given by Professor Lawrence Cahoone under the auspices of the Great Courses educational company. Cahoone’s title was The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida. The time span is therefore from the early 17th century to the mid 20th century! And (one imagines that) Professor Cahoone really only included Derrida for the sake of alliteration. By the time that Derrida was writing, modernism was already devolving, or dissolving, into post-modernism. It has been a ‘long and winding road’ from cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) – which, in any event, a realist should insist on inverting to read ‘I am therefore I think’ – to Derrida’s il n’y a pas hors du texte (there is nothing outside the text). The term modern, in philosophy, is therefore used simply by way of contrast with the ancient or classical philosophy of the Greeks (and to a lesser extent the Romans), and also with the medieval philosophy of the scholastics. And, in fact, as we have seen, Mortimer Adler thought that this modern philosophy is riddled with mistakes, and that it would be better for us to return to the wisdom of their predecessors, in particular Aristotle and Aquinas (yet another example of philosophical alliteration!).

Alder confessed that his own title was ‘inaccurate but not misleading.’ It was inaccurate because (perhaps needless to say) there are actually many more than just ten philosophical mistakes. He tells us that a more cumbersome but more exact title would have been Ten Subjects About Which Philosophical Mistakes Have Made. No doubt his readers entirely sympathized with the choice of title that he did make. Be that as it may, for our purposes a simple list of the ten subjects will suffice. These are;

Consciousness and its Objects

The Intellect and the Senses

Words and Meanings

Knowledge and Opinion

Moral Values

Happiness and Contentment

Freedom of Choice

Human Nature

Human Society

Human Existence

So, this a very wide range of topics. and I hope that we will be able to discuss and debate some or all of these subjects at length during APC meetings in the 2020/21 season and beyond.

To give some idea of the sorts of issues that may arise, briefly consider the first question about Consciousness and its Objects. The basic issue, as Alder sees it, is the question of what it is that we are of conscious of, when we are indeed conscious. The mistake, he thinks, is that many people, including modern philosophers, have tended to suppose that they what they are directly conscious of, and all they are directly conscious of, is the content of their own minds. This is true in some instances, when we directly feel pleasure or pain, or strains and aches in our bodies. That is to say, it applies to a class of ‘thoughts’ that we might call sensations. However, it does not apply to the class of the contents of the mind that we might more properly call ideas, such as memories, perceptions, concepts, etc. In the case of ideas, in Adler’s view, it is always the idea’s object of which we are directly conscious not the idea itself. The ideas are not ‘that which we apprehend’ but ‘the means by which’ we apprehend the object. To take the opposite view ‘locks up’ the separate individuals in their own subjective headspace, and leads to all of the pseudo-problems and paradoxes of modern philosophy, such as the need to ‘prove’ the existence of an external reality, the critique of knowledge, skepticism, solipsism, idealism, and so on.

Adler identifies John Locke, in the 17th century, as the first to have made the crucial mistake, by wrongly using the term ‘idea’ to stand for all the contents of the mind, including sensations. And, by the same token, Locke also seemed to use the word ‘thinking’ as a blanket term to cover all the activities of the mind, without exception. Locke was therefore unable to meaningfully distinguish the ‘intellect’ and the ‘senses’ - which brings us to Adler’s second topic from the list. And, all of the remaining subjects are, in one way or another, related to this fundamental error in the beginning. Adler argues that the original mistake by Locke was never picked up. It was common to all of the British empiricists including Hume, and then carried on uncorrected in Kant, Hegel, and onwards. Alder’s remedy, as I say, would be to go back to the drawing board to recover the insights possessed by (some of) the ancients and scholastics, notably the original ‘two As’. (I suppose Adler himself makes three?)

Comments

What an excellent way to structure a deep dive into philosophy!

I want to make a few remarks on the organizing terms and distinctions and then offer a thought on the first topic. First, on the 'modern' in 'modern philosophy', and on philosophical epochs in general: the historian Quentin Skinner says "[A]ll communities tell stories about themselves, about the distinctive nature of their formation and achievements. These stories can have a powerful role in constituting our identities, and so in defining and sustaining our common life" ("The Place of History in Public Life"). This is true of academic communities as much as any other community, and in academic communities, their self-stories are often revealed by the structure of textbooks and syllabi. In the Anglophone world, it is currently common for a course on "modern philosophy" to start with Descartes on the European continent and Locke in Great Britain, to run through Hobbes and Berkeley and Leibniz and Spinoza up to Rousseau and Hume, and maybe finish with Kant as a coda. Note that these are all dead white guys. The limited story told through this list of characters is incomplete, so the story is now commonly expanded to include essential figures such as Wollstonecraft. But whoever is on the list, note the tendency to end at Kant, which brings "modern philosophy" to an end around 1800. Why then? And why start with Descartes?

One of the central reasons for the starting point, as Smithin and Adler point out, is the break that Descartes and many of his contemporaries made with the Aristotelian tradition that had dominated medieval Europe through the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. You'll see this philosophy described as "Thomistic" or "Scholastic." "Moderns" like Descartes took issue with the scholastic notion of teleology, which is the idea that natural changes aim at some goal. Taken to the extreme, one might describe a river in teleological terms as wanting to reach the sea, or one might describe springtime teleologically as having the goal of turning into summer. Modern philosophy was born alongside the age of modern science, and there is no place in this worldview for thinking of rivers and seasons--and later, of compounds and quarks--as having goals and desires. Instead, the world is depicted mechanistically, i.e., as one big natural machine. Machines don't have minds, so they don't have desires or goals. In the modern view, rivers flow and seasons change because of external forces, not because they have desires and goals. (For an excellent overview of this, see Richard Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science, Ch. 2 ("The Mechanical Philosophy").)

The modern view is also marked by an optimism in the power of reason to understand the totality of existence. On one version of this view, God is perfectly reasonable and made a perfectly reasonable world, and the better we humans use our faculty or reason, the better we will understand the divine and perfect reason of the world God created. We humans may never be able to understand everything, because we are finite and flawed in a variety of ways, but these limits are not limits on reason itself but rather on our human ability to use reason. Kant challenges this optimism about reason in his first major work, A Critique of Pure Reason. Reason, Kant thinks, can only tells us about the world as we perceive it, but in order to make sense of our perceptions as perceptions, we have to posit the existence of "Things-in-Themselves" that we cannot perceive and cannot cognize beyond labeling them. This places a limit on reason, for it is an assertion that there are aspects of being that are fundamentally unknowable. Once we recognize this limit, Kant thinks, we will change the way we do philosophy. This is one reason "modern philosophy" is often said to end with Kant, all the way back in 1787.

On then to 'consciousness': Locke is a fine figure to start with, because he is the first Anglophone writer to separate "consciousness" from "conscience." Prior to Locke, when one spoke in English of being conscious of something, it was typically of the things a person privately finds in their conscience, e.g., guilty thoughts and truths that they and they alone know. Locke, as it were, secularizes the idea of consciousness. He claims that a person is conscious, not just of their guilty thoughts and deeds, but also of how, e.g., redness appears to them, hops taste to them, a flute sounds to them. As Adler notes, this depicts us humans as aware only of our inner worlds, walled off by our perceptions from the world outside of us...if there even is a world outside of us! Descartes paints a similar picture at the beginning of his Meditations. The go-to example from pop culture of what this could be like is The Matrix. Neo only discovers the truth of how things really are once he takes the red pill; everything beforehand that he thought to be real and true was merely an illusion. The way Locke and Descartes depict perception, it is an open philosophical question if and how a person can get beyond their possibly illusory perceptions to the truth of the world outside of them. The way these modern philosophers set up their accounts of perception--or, in Locke's new terminology, of consciousness--leaves open the possibility that we are all like Neo is before he takes the red pill.

One way out of this problem is, as Adler suggests, to return to Aristotle. And indeed, this is the road suggested by John McDowell in his seminal Mind and World. It weaves insights from Aristotle and Kant along with the 20th-century philosopher Wittgenstein to show how we can overcome this philosophical perplexity. McDowell invites us to use philosophy, not to solve these problems, but to dissolve them. So, here is a challenge: what tempts us into the modern view of consciousness in the first place, and can we resist this temptation?

Thank you Graham, for this very insightful comment.

From my point of view another important figure here is Etienne Gilson, the 2Oth century Catholic philosopher, and one time Director of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, in Toronto,  whose solution was also in some sense to return to the verities of the Ancients (Aristotle) and Scholastics (Aquinas). He was he author of such works as Methodical Realism, Thomas Realism and the Critique of Knowledge, and Being and Some Philosophers. D'Ansi Mendoza's 2012 thesis, whose subtitle was Realism per totam viam dealt with the views of both Aristotle and Gilson (and others) on realism.

But these references also raise the further question, of whether is is possible to separate out the purely philosophical issues, such as, as you say, resisting the temptation to adopt the modern view of consciousness, from the more generally theological ones? (It just occurs to me that the metaphor of temptation plays a role in that discourse also).

Glison's original thesis, actually, was about Descartes and his (Descartes's) break with the scholastic tradition.